Recent articles

I wrote another letter to Pope Francis; in this one, I discuss why I
believe that organizing lay intentional communities may lead to a more
engaged, meaningful, satisfying, and effective Christianity than is
currently operating in the world. It is my goal to carry this conversation
as far as I am able, so I begin by sharing the letter here.

After the meetings of this past weekend, my perception of at least
two friends has deepened and become richer. Much of our connection was
around experiences of love and expressions of affection, and what these
mean for us. They also tie in to our vision for living in intentional
community. I think I can see my practice of empathy (with the support of
NVC) paying
dividends, and oh, does that ever make me happy.

Early into this year, several friends and I met to brainstorm
about goals and concerns surrounding an ecovillage project that we are
actively imagining. I took pictures of our notes, and I transcribe them
here for reference, sharing, and further reflection.

When discussing concern over environmental exploitation and
destruction, often particularly regarding global warming, the question
often arises: what about nuclear? But what is the question for which
nuclear energy is the answer? To slow global warming, the correct
question is: how do we go about reducing the amount of carbon we
emit? But that's entirely unrelated to the question that nuclear
energy answers, which is: how do we generate more electricity?

Nuclear energy is pursued in the interests of—and based on an
assumption of—economic growth. Without the growth assumption, it is not
necessary. With the growth assumption in place, it is not
sufficient.

We have yet another opportunity to submit public comments on the
proposal to permit the Keystone XL pipeline to be built. This time, I'm
going to zero in on one particularly pernicious assumption presented in
the Final Environmental Impact Statement: that the energy industry will
just find alternatives to the pipeline, so disastrous tar sands
exploitation is inevitable.

Thinking about the history of Jesus requires thinking historically
about the era in which he lived and the circumstances surrounding the
early stories written about him. In his book,
Zealot, Resa Aslan provides a valuable (and
compelling) historical framework for approaching these topics, but ends
up using it to say more about the development of early Christianity than
about Jesus.

Oh you, who hunger for nurturing a life of justice by living in
intentional community, I want to share life with you. I hold title to a
suburban home and plot in the greater Cleveland, Ohio area, where I am
working to foster a space for some of us to live together and support each
other. As of this writing, we have plenty of open space in this house for
you to live with us, and we also have plenty of need for your help and
support as we work to heal and strengthen the broader community.

If the period of American history between the end of the US Civil War
and World War I—perhaps called the Gilded Age—does not contain events that
register strongly in the emotional consciousness of many Americans, it is
not because this period did not contribute to major changes in the world of
the time. With such intensely violent conflicts serving as bookends, the
intervening years may seem like an intermission providing a lull between
compelling stories, rather than part of a much larger drama that was,
itself, punctuated by violence. Instead, this period demonstrated a larger
pattern of aggressive activity, insecurity, and unrest; these were all
closely bound up in the ongoing struggle for progress and prosperity,
though, and the American ideal highlights the latter glory and dismisses the
former distress. It is good to see the full truth. Studying this period
allows us to see an example of how persistent economic expansion rapidly
sets the stage for systemic shocks and conflict.

The dominant economic system is an ugly and frightening thing, and
I desperately want to encourage everyone to think through its moral
implications. So I am excited that Roman Catholics currently have a Pope
who is at least drawing attention to economic issues, because they are
so essential to understanding every moral issue. His recent
prescriptions, however, betray a poor understanding of the true nature
of the disorder from both a historical and a Christian approach. So I
wrote him a letter.

Statesmen and other influential American figures at the start of the
20th century believed that the dramatic surge of expansion that sharply
marked the 19th century was essential to American prosperity and security
going forward. In his book The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy, William Appleman Williams tracks the continuity of
this idea through the middle of the 20th century, and contrasts this
uncompromising pursuit of expansion with the American belief that this
economic intervention would also bring peace and wealth to the rest of the
world. The tragedy that Williams promotes to the title of the book is the
fact that American ideals contradicted themselves: they spoke about freedom
and self-determination while simultaneously depending on privileging
American access and control.

The government of the United States has repeatedly moved to suppress
free speech and other civil liberties during times of national crisis as far
back as 1798. That is the point of departure for the broad and detailed
Perilous Times. With this book, Geoffrey Stone
provides an extensive legal history of the country, with a very pointed and
important focus on the freedom and constraints of its citizens to offer
critiques of the government itself at extreme moments. Though judicial
interpretation has consistently worked to augment defenses for such
protests, this only comes respectively later, after equally consistent
pressure from the government has circumvented all such existing defenses
during the time of crisis itself.

My recent article, The moral
vote, prompted an interesting conversation, as I had hoped. A
very prominent response to the question of how to vote (and which does, in
fact, infuse our decision-making in general) is to choose the best of the
available options, even if that choice involves a moral compromise (thus
this is also viewed from the opposite angle as the
lesser evil choice). It is just this approach that we debated, but
this discussion took place in a
separate venue, so I wanted to highlight it here.

This past Saturday, my housemates and I hosted a party to celebrate
our acquisition of a house in which we've been living together in community
since July 27. Part of the plan for the party was to put together a speech
in which we introduced what we want to do with the house and the community.
We each wrote up our thoughts; what we actually presented was an edited
combination of these. I provide my original thoughts below, which I think
stand well on their own.

If you only consider some of the issues at stake, then any
institution that you empower with your vote can decide other issues
toward arbitrary ends. But it all matters—a lot—because these ends—which
you will have shunted in your concern for others—are often immoral and
destructive. Thus, compromise is impossible, and instead we must lead
through consistent moral unity even in the face of formal defeat.

I've seen several powerful films in the last couple of months.
Four of them brought me to tears. I want to share my experiences with
you, in part so that you can determine whether you might also want to so
spend your time and attention.

Panoramic views—where we strive to see both broadly and bravely—of
both the destruction that we wreak on the world as well as the beauty of
a potentially just world are each astonishing, although in quite
different ways. Understanding the first can help us work for and teach
effectively about the second.

If I am going to live in close cooperation with other people, then
the resulting community should be based on a shared commitment to
certain core principles. Herein I develop the principles that I value,
providing a cursory motivation, where appropriate.

The next stage of our plan to halt the development of the destructive
Keystone XL pipeline is to raise the issue everywhere, including in
Cleveland. We want the Obama administration to feel pressure about this
continually, and from every direction. I submitted the following letter to
the Plain Dealer yesterday; in it I ask you to join me at our Shaker Square
rally next week in order to help to deliver this message.

Bill McKibben hosted a video chat this past Wednesday for those
attending the upcoming Tar Sands Action, and in it he encouraged people to
write letters to the editor to raise awareness about the protest. I composed
the following letter and submitted a version of it to the Plain Dealer
today. It was a little bit long, so I had to whittle it down to size, but I
still prefer this slightly longer version.

Prior to the start of World War I, the great Powers in Europe (The
United Kingdom, France, and Russia) had continually expanded their influence
in the Middle East. The conclusion of the war formalized this influence in
key areas with the treaties and diplomacy that developed the system of
mandates in the region. The United Kingdom serves as a key example of an
outside power that reshaped Middle Eastern political institutions to serve
its own ends. The victors of World War I, for example the UK, used both
their military victory and the regional circumstances in the Middle East to
further solidify their dominance in the area.

A look at two critical histories of the decision to use atomic
bombs towards the end of World War II reveals a different picture than
what had been asserted by the official and deliberate oversimplification
and distortion after the bombs were used.

It is a real challenge, but it is also of real value to assess the
basic motives that lead people to behave in certain ways and to make certain
decisions. The intensity, tumult, and pointed moral factors that surrounded
the US War of 1861 make it a useful focal point for the study of the moral
trajectory of the United States, as well as a poignant exemplar of the
execution of moral will.

The development and strengthening of abolitionism in the North prior
to the US war of 1861 portrays an intensifying moral commitment there. Even
given the church schisms over slavery in the 1830s and 1840s, however,
Northern churches remained ambivalent about antislavery activism, as John R.
McKivigan shows in The War against Pro-Slavery
Religion. Many abolitionists believed that slavery could only be
successfully conquered by means of the church; they worked fervently in
their churches to shift them to a position of radical antislavery, but the
Northern churches resisted taking such a stand until the coming of the
war.

In the first decades of the existence of the Unites States, leading to
the War of 1861, evangelical Christianity had largely imbued the nation's
citizenry with a sense that they were being guided providentially on a path
that would enable the country to usher in the Kingdom of God. With
The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Mark A. Noll
describes the problems that were growing within this national understanding
as the war approached and then broke. He also hints at how this crisis may
have fundamentally changed religious attitudes throughout the
country.

A major development that would contribute to the US war of 1861 was
the Southern decision to secede from the Union. Many historians see an array
of factors that led the South to this point. With Gospel of
disunion, Mitchell Snay argues that the moral and cultural
influence of religion contributed significantly to the South's growing sense
that it no longer could participate in the Union. In this book, Snay shows
how Southern religion ended up being a multipurpose tool in facilitating the
coming war: it identified points of conflict with the North while it also
helped to bring Southerners together.

In response to the recent financial crisis, the Federal Reserve
independently gave out loans that dwarfed those of the Congressional
authorization in TARP. Recently, some very interesting and troubling
details have emerged about those loans.

Religious institutions of the United States in the early and middle
nineteenth century closely followed and contributed to the larger national
efforts. Thus, as C. C. Goen describes in Broken Churches, Broken
Nation, the schisms in the dominant Protestant denominations in
the 1830s and the 1840s both foreshadowed and prepared for the more
destructive civil crisis to come.

How did the United States perceive and justify itself with respect to
the crisis surrounding the War of 1861? In order to understand “the
moral tone of the victorious Union” (xii), James Moorhead reviews the
particular position of Northern “mainstream” Protestant
denominations in his book American Apocalypse.

In response to a comment on my last article, I point out that
emphasizing job creation reinforces unsustainable growth policies, and I
also consider the relationship between jobs and food in our
society.

The ferocity with which powerful interests are attacking WikiLeaks
and Julian Assange provides a hint about the potency of the information
that WikiLeaks has been publishing. Democracy Now! has been both doing
an excellent job of covering the ongoing WikiLeaks affair while at the
same time using that information to agitate for justice at the 2010
United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 16) in Cancún. All of this provides a
valuable window into how power operates and responds to threats.

As the first invited guest of the Town Hall of
Cleveland, T. Boone Pickens talked about his energy plan. In
his presentation and the following question & answer session, Pickens
made it clear that his plan is largely similar to the existing
approach—requiring increasing exploitation of fossil fuels, giving
a nod to renewable sources, and stubbornly ignoring the problem of
growth—but focusing on domestic resources instead of foreign
ones.

A year into its work, the Sustainable
Cleveland 2019 project had
its second summit this week. This article provides a summary and a
critique of the events of the summit. Mainly, the summit emphasized the
way that businesses and other communities can benefit from practices that
are commonly labeled as sustainable, although it did not provide a
framework for analyzing whether the result of these practices does lead
to a sustainable society.

The Cleveland Department of Public Health recently held a public
hearing to provide information and allow comments about the renewal of The
Medical Center Company's permit to pollute from a facility that consumes
coal and natural gas, located in University Circle. This article discusses
the results of that hearing.

The first meeting of the Beyond Cleveland sustainability group was
not very well attended, although we who did attend did have a meaningful
conversation. I reflect on the implications of this meeting in this
article.

I recently finished reading A People's History of the
United States. In this article, I comment on the impact of
this book, including its strong impact on me as well as some of the
lessons that I learned about how resistance against oppression can
fail.

If you believe that we, as a culture, are not living sustainably,
then we must critically examine why we are not living this way, and we
must work actively to fix this problem. Beyond Cleveland is one group
working to increase understanding of the problem of sustainability as
well as to plan action to solve it.

I had a lot of fun this weekend, mostly revolving around several
discrete events. I desire to both share some of my sense of the weekend
as well as comment on how community presents itself at such
events.

Some situations may require strong encryption in ZIP files, but
the common zip utility available on
GNU systems does not
support strong encryption. Thankfully, 7-Zip
and P7ZIP are Free Software projects that
fill this niche. This essay provides a brief overview of how to find and
use 7z, which both projects provide, for this
purpose.

I think that information wants to be free, and I want to live in a
society that has healthy mechanisms for supporting the free flow of this
information and the creative people who author it. But when they ask me
to donate to support their work, I always cringe. I don't think we
should buy the information that they produce, but rather that donations
should still be purchases … of recognition, access, and other
interesting intangibles.

In some situations, it may make sense to try to significantly reduce
the number of duplicates in a collection, while ensuring that memory usage
does not increase without bound. To help with this, I created a Python
utility called a RecentSet, which serves as a sort
of first-pass filter for significantly reducing the number of duplicates
in a collection.

The trunk line of KDE development is being used actively for
developing KDE 4, which may be released late this year or early next
year. The KDE build documentation warns that "the trunk" is very buggy
and may not work at all. This article describes a successful build of
the current state of some KDE 4 components, and gives some building and
development pointers from a newcomer's point-of-view.

People want to be able to take web identifiers, or Uniform
Resource Identifiers (URIs), and copy them into their web browsers to
obtain information related to such identifiers. Designating similar but
not identical URIs to those used to locate documents may help in solving
some web architecture problems. This report summarizes these problems
and discusses this solution proposal.